However, I wonder how much consideration was given to children when this legislation was enacted. Concerns with underage drinking, smoking, and drug use are often used now when discussing laws related to them, so it might be that the Prohibition was partially motivated by concerns for the kids. But the cynic in me suspects it was more to do with religion.

I don’t think there was much, if any concern about children imbibing.

Prohibition was the result of a confluence of events. Religion was involved but, IMO, they sort of tagged on to what other groups were doing and joined forces. Religion was some of the moral rationale for Prohibition but the real people pushing it had to do with the Feminist movement combined with the Social Worker Movement. Most of the social workers of the day were women so there was a lot of overlap between those two groups.

The feminists of the day wrapped themselves as upstanding Christian women who were concerned about their men going out, getting drunk and spending their paychecks in the bars before paying their bills and taking care of their familial obligations (as well as those who came home drunk and physically abused their spouse and/or children).

At the same time, there were no major government social welfare programs as we know them today. That sort of thing was handled by groups like the current Salvation Army and were staffed mostly by women. Those women had their own effort in place to “professionalize” social workers and get them to a point where they’d have professional recognition. So the whole drunkard/spouse abuser/child abuser story line played directly into their realm too.

So in 1909 we had the passage of the income tax and in 1917 we got Prohibition. You might note that these two Amendments are the first attempts at using the power of the Federal Government to influence social activities of individuals as opposed to influencing the States or “the people” collectively. Prior to this point in time, that was something that only the States did with their “Blue laws” and “Sin taxes”.

The income tax allowed the Feds to decide what activities you, as an individual, could participate in that were “good” (have children, finance a house, donate to charity, etc…) that would be exempted/deducted from counting as income, or “bad” (any income that wasn’t spent on something “good”) and thus subject to income tax.

Prohibition opened the door to the Feds banning “harmful” products at the national level.

Both are fairly major power grabs for people who prefer Federalism.